Authors: Sally Armstrong
The behavioural scientist Linda Caporael is a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Her work in analyzing the causes of witch burning led her to conclude that women were more affected by ergot poisoning than men, that pregnant women were most affected and that mental symptoms
from the poisoning included mania, melancholia, psychosis and delirium, which were presumed by religious leaders to be symptomatic of demonic possession.
Unmarried women didn’t fare any better than married women in the eyes of the church. They were their fathers’ property and could be used or abused as their fathers saw fit. Like their married sisters, they were forbidden entrance to the professions and to all but a few trades. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V forbade them to appear on the public stage within his dominions, which soon led to a ban of actresses and female singers across Christendom.
It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that women would begin to shed the shackles of religious-based laws that had kept them away from professions, off juries and out of the paid workforce. Although women have yet to achieve equality in any religion, including Hinduism and Buddhism, there are some Christians, Jews and Muslims who still live by fundamentalist laws that oppress women and have hardly budged in a thousand years.
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Modern interpretations have altered the original views of the authors of the various holy books, but modern fundamentalists in every religion are still draconian in enforcing old rules.
Dr. Sima Samar knows a thing or two about directives to women coming in the guise of a message from God. She is the woman who defied the Taliban and kept open her schools for girls and her health clinics for women in Afghanistan even when they threatened to kill her if she didn’t shut them down. She says, “Religion has been misused politically, not only in Afghanistan
but in every other part of the world. It’s a question of education. If you don’t know what’s in the Quran, or you don’t understand the meaning of the words, you are liable to misinterpret religion and use it against women’s rights.”
She views most of the edicts promulgated by mullahs in Afghanistan as misguided. The language of the Quran is Arabic. In Afghanistan people speak Dari and Farsi. Not only that but 85 percent of Afghan women and about 75 percent of Afghan men, including mullahs, are illiterate and so can’t read the Arabic text anyway. It’s not surprising that women in Afghanistan describe their illiteracy as like being blind.
It’s the increase in literacy as well as the fact that women are becoming more confident and learning about tools to defend their rights that’s bringing change to places like Afghanistan, despite it being home to some of the worst extremists.
Farida Shaheed, the prominent Pakistani women’s rights activist, says, “Women are affected by religion throughout the world. Religion has not withered away. It is back and has increased in power, even in Eastern Europe [after the fall of the Soviet Union]. The issue is who does the interpretation of what religion means: religion as faith is the least problematic; as custom, it’s a bigger problem; but as politics, it becomes the most problematic. Religion is being harnessed to further political agendas.”
The research that Shaheed has conducted in Chile, the United States, Serbia, Mexico, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, India, Nigeria and Turkey shows some interesting trends. “It’s often not just religious groups who use religion for power,” she says. “It’s used for alliances across the board of very conservative agendas.” Many of those agendas are written in the government offices of Muslim countries, not in the mosques.
Isobel Coleman, the foreign policy specialist and also the author of
Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East
, sees extraordinary effort by both women and men to promote greater rights for women within the framework of Islam. “In many of these countries, some of the worst violations of women’s rights are done in the name of Islam, but the new generation says, ‘That’s not the way we read it.’ ” Throughout the Middle East and in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, women and girls have told her that they insist on a greater role for women based on a more progressive reading of the Quran. And they see women taking more of the lead in pushing the boundaries.
The example that Coleman cites is Musawah (which means “equality” in Arabic), a movement launched in 2007 by Sisters in Islam, an NGO that seeks equality within the Muslim family and promotes women’s rights within a religious framework. Its leader, Zainah Anwar, says, “At the heart of Islamic feminism is the contention that Muslim women will no longer be shut up by some verse in the Quran.” She refers to the family lives of Muslims, which is mostly based on what the Quran says about the role of women. Coleman says, “It’s very prescriptive, not always amenable to equality for women.” Active in more than fifty countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America and Australia, Musawah is a global movement calling for equality, non-discrimination and dignity as the basis of all human relations; full and equal citizenship for every individual; and marriage and family relations based on principles of equality, with men and women sharing equal rights and responsibilities. The principles of Musawah are taken straight from the seventh century CE when Islam arrived in Arabia:
I am equal before the eyes of God
I have the right to my own property
I have the right to inherit property
I can sign my own contracts
I can choose my own husband
I can’t be forced to marry against my will
I can write a marriage contract and impose conditions on my husband-to-be
I have the right to divorce my husband
I am entitled to dignity and respect
I am entitled to an education
I have the right to think for myself
I have the right to lead my people to the right path.
Musawah has been embraced by men and women as well as secularists who usually keep a distance from religious organizations. But taking on the power brokers in the business of religion is still a sometimes dangerous and always baffling task. Consider the remarks of a senior academic in Saudi Arabia, Kamal Subhi, who in response to the increasing demand of women in the kingdom to be allowed to drive reported to the Saudi legislative assembly that allowing women to drive would spell the end of virginity in the kingdom. Or this from one of the leaders of the Christian right in the United States, the Reverend Pat Robertson: “The Feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
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Women have challenged religious zealots in earlier eras, but there has generally been a reluctance to bring legal action against them. That has changed. Rebecca Cook is a professor at the University of Toronto’s law school, acclaimed for the academic work she has done on women, health and human rights. Recently she stood as a witness in a Canadian court reference case that is bound to have international implications. The practice of polygamy among members of a religious sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) in a place called Bountiful, British Columbia, was on trial.
Getting the case to court was an ordeal that had been ongoing since 1904, when the Mormon Church issued a manifesto telling its followers to abandon the practice of polygamy. A splinter group that believed polygamy was ordained by God and was their ticket to heaven, broke away and formed the FLDS. The followers, today estimated at about ten thousand, reside in Utah, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota, Alberta and British Columbia. Their activities went largely unnoticed (except for the occasional accusation from neighbours about child brides and multiple wives) until 1988, when a woman named Debbie Palmer escaped from the Bountiful community and went public with the disturbing facts of her life in a polygamous marriage. Her convoluted family tree contains so many branches that, as she says, she is her own step-great-grandmother. Palmer has eight children, seventy-six stepchildren, forty-seven brothers and sisters and three ex-husbands. You need a calculator to do the matrimonial math and a user’s guide to Canada’s Criminal Code to follow the sad, often brutal, story of Palmer and the other women who have left the FLDS.
Palmer’s parents moved to Bountiful when she was two years
old. At fifteen, she was given in marriage to a man who was fifty-five. He had five other wives and thirty children, some of them older than Palmer. He died two years after they married, and she was given to another man, also fifty-five, who had four other wives and twenty-seven children. When he was deemed to be abusive by the sect’s leader at the time, she was sent off to a third husband, who already had two wives and twelve children. That husband was accused and later convicted in a B.C. court of sexually assaulting and abusing Palmer.
By age thirty-four, she had been beaten, humiliated and raped with a fist, a stick and anally by various men in the community. That’s the year she finally packed her kids into an old van and drove out of Bountiful forever. She’s been unpacking the emotional baggage ever since.
The criticism she levelled at the church leaders was shocking: she told of plural marriages in which men had as many as twenty-five wives, of marriages in which fifteen-year-old girls were wed to sixty-five-year-old men. She told of “lost boys” who were excommunicated to ensure plenty of wives for the community elders. She told of welfare fraud in which the first wife is the so-called legal spouse, making the rest single moms who apply for and get welfare. She disclosed the secret rituals of the sect and also described a community of white supremacists.
Adherents believe that the Second Coming of Christ will see everyone from outside their colony burned alive, while the men with their multiple wives and children are saved in a “lifting-up” that will literally raise their colonies above the fire. Then they will become gods of new planets. At least that’s how they interpret this religious teaching: “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” Many FLDS rituals support this dogma.
At a wedding or “celestial marriage,” the woman and man create the Sure Sign of the Nail, which means their middle fingers touch each other’s wrists on the place Christ was nailed to the cross. And there’s the Law of Chastity, which says a woman can have sex only when she’s ovulating. Any other sex is considered adultery. “It’s not about sex for salvation,” says Palmer. “It’s sex for breeding cheap labour.”
If the road to heaven is multiple marriages, the way to hell is criticizing the leader. One of the laws of the FLDS is Blood Atonement. It states that if members have committed certain sins, such as complaining about the prophet (every leader is a prophet), they can be forgiven only if they have their “blood spilt upon the ground.” Although the member winds up dead from the process, which can also involve being disembowelled and burned alive, she or he can gain entry to heaven despite the sin.
From the moment she fled with her children in 1992, Palmer appealed to every provincial attorney general to hold the office in B.C. to investigate Bountiful. For years, nothing happened. In fact, Palmer had directed so many petitions and letters to B.C. attorney general Geoff Plant that when I arrived for an interview at his riding office in Richmond, B.C., in 2004, his assistant sighed and said, “Will this result in another flood of letters?”
One attorney general after another refused to take Bountiful on, as they feared the constitutional right to freedom of religion would trump any criminal charges related to trafficking in child brides, underage marriage and sex with minors. Furthermore, Bountiful’s leader, Winston Blackmore, made sure his own idyllic interpretation of the sect was well understood by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who were asked to investigate by women from the nearby town of Creston. But Blackmore sent a
parade of contented female followers to talk to the cops; the RCMP didn’t lay any charges.
After CBC’s
the fifth estate
aired a documentary on Blackmore called “The Bishop of Bountiful” in 2001, newspaper stories followed. Oprah Winfrey did a show in 2003 about the religious shenanigans in Bountiful. A few days after that telecast, a letter was posted on her website from B.C.’s premier Gordon Campbell. The letter claimed that prosecuting would “require significant police resources,” that only a few witnesses have come forward and that, furthermore, it’s the fault of the federal government for not amending the criminal code regarding polygamy. Debbie Palmer kept the facts about polygamy flowing at conferences about violence against women and in letters to politicians. But still nothing changed. In jargon-filled apologias from both federal and provincial ministers of justice, Palmer was basically told to get lost.
I went to Bountiful to investigate the allegations in the spring of 2004. What I found was trouble in the so-called paradise. In this place fifteen-year-old girls were having babies with fifty-year-old men and were supposed to smile sweetly about it because it was God’s will.
From a distance the place looked like the Garden of Eden. Nestled beneath British Columbia’s East Kootenay Mountains, in a temperate valley of rich topsoil, the community of Bountiful seemed like a land of peace and prosperity. As I drove closer to this colony of a thousand people, I could see children playing in the fields. Teenaged girls in pastel ankle-length dresses and long braided hair waved a greeting, looking as though they’d come out of another century, one that valued plain living and family ties.
Inside the colony, a different story unfolded. There used to be a collection of nine rocks on the ground at the entrance, each one
with a letter on it spelling out “Keep Sweet”—the sect’s dictum to its women. Recently someone had flipped the rocks over and written a different set of letters: “Fuck you!!” The plot where the rocks were displayed was gone and the ground was bare. The long-held secrets of Bountiful were leaking like the battered oil cans that littered the place. They revealed incest and deception, sexual abuse, cross-border trafficking of brides, breeding young girls like cattle, tax fraud and white supremacy. Not your average Canadian tale.